Startups CEO is lying to potential clients and investors about our number of paid users. And it's in writing. |
- CEO is lying to potential clients and investors about our number of paid users. And it's in writing.
- The Five Biggest Things I've Learned From Building A Start Up
- How do you start a social media account for a business?
- Is an interactive UI enough to show what value can a product bring to users?
- What does the future hold for tech-startups?
- Thank you for all the posts, but still struggling
- Clueless teen here but with an ambition to launch a startup here, where do I begin?
- Is it worth to send cold snail mail investors?
- Out of the testing phase, should everything be proprietary in Beta?
- Why does the internet in general seem to be against people trying to “self promote” their ideas?
- I've been lurking here for a little while.. I'm wondering why the "idea-guy" doesn't usually get any love here.
- App Development
- I lost my job. Snap me back to reality
| CEO is lying to potential clients and investors about our number of paid users. And it's in writing. Posted: 21 Mar 2019 08:11 PM PDT Our CEO is lying to potential clients and investors about our number of paid users. The information he is showing and sharing is wildy overstated. Growth charts show a parabolic growth rate when in reality we're barely growing, and in a linear fashion at that. I'm concerned about being associated with someone who is willing to lie and misrepresent our capabilities. We're in a growing but still niche industry where everyone knows the competition. The company has potential to succeed but he's really forcing it and I fear he's not aware of the deception and half-truths he's selling. Eventually word will get out and I would hate to have my reputation damaged by association. Is he violating any laws or is this just a shady business practice? Looking for some feedback or advice. Thanks. [link] [comments]  |
| The Five Biggest Things I've Learned From Building A Start Up Posted: 21 Mar 2019 06:42 AM PDT I originally posted this as a blog on medium - for some context, I'm the founder/ceo of a social media app for making plans with your friends. Odds are, you haven't read my first blog post detailing the story of my startup inception-launch. If you have a few extra minutes, the link will be in the comments - it provides some useful context for the things I'm about to write about. That said, reading it is not required to be able to learn something from this post. 1: Discipline and focus are muscles.Until I started working on my app, I was not a disciplined person by any stretch of the imagination. I was diagnosed with ADD in 10th grade, but I view it more as a label more than a diagnosis — it's not a label I've resigned to, but instead is something I recognize and actively work on. One my ADD tendencies is needing near instant gratification in order to preserve my interest. It doesn't help that we live in a world where attention is currency and companies profit from manipulating your brain into releasing as much dopamine as possible. The best benchmark for my ability to focus is how much I rely on music. Before I began working on my app, I needed to listen to music in order to focus on a task. The fundamental part of ADD is being easily distracted — my prefrontal cortex is simply worse at filtering out external stimuli than the average person (which I'm honestly grateful for, but I'll get into that more in a future blog post). If I wasn't listening to music I knew well enough to predict what came next, I would become distracted by novel stimuli (especially sounds) without consciously realizing I was now thinking about something else. Now, a year and a half later, I rely on music much less. I have a coding playlist that started off being mostly instrumental music (shoutout Ratatat), but grew to include more music with words as I became better at ignoring the words to focus. I still prefer to listen to music while I work, but it's not a necessity to prevent myself from being distracted. This is mostly a product of habitual meditation. I set hourly reminders to do some quick meditation by focusing on 10 breaths — this means turn your music off, close your eyes, sit up straight, and take deep, slow breaths. This should take at least a minute. It took me less than a week to notice a dramatic difference in my general mental state: I was more aware and present with my tasks, which is one of the parts of ADD I struggle with most. I also felt generally more at ease throughout the day, and I could calm my mind more easily and fall asleep faster at night. Another ADD tendency is hyperfocus — when I'm in the middle of something (especially coding) it's hard to tear myself away and do nothing except focus on breathing. This is because the less conscious part of my mind (the one that makes impulsive decisions) views meditation as high effort and low reward. I'd rather continue programming because when I finish a task, I get a dopamine release. Meditating is not only hard, it's boring — and there's no real immediate reward. However, any work I'd get done in the minute break doesn't compare to the higher quality work I produce over the next hour because I took the time to step back and become more present with everything I'm doing. 2: Be honest with yourself.This requires removing your ego from most things. If you can't admit your shortcomings or learn from your mistakes, you'll stagnate, and to stagnate is to fail. Attempting to preserve my ego by deluding myself into believing I can focus just as well as everyone else with the same level of effort is only going to hurt me in the long run. When I had the idea of an app that helped you make plans with your friends my freshman year of college (Spring 2016), I didn't get very far. Despite having a strong background in tech/comp sci — I'd only written two lines of code in a project folder called munchr before giving up. Why did I give up? It was easier to blame the fact that another app for making plans (DownToLunch) was blowing up than to admit I wasn't disciplined/motivated enough to get to a point where I could make progress. My motivation to build the app (at least, in that stage of my life) primarily revolved around the end goal of me being a famous CEO worth hundreds of millions of dollars. As it turns out, the fantasy of the view from the summit of CEO Mountain was not a powerful enough motivator to keep me climbing — nor would it have ended up fulfilling me as much as I expected anyway. You have to work on something because you love the process, and I did not yet love the process of creating, because —and this may come as a surprise — it's pretty fucking hard. 3: You are your best asset. Invest in yourself.I read somewhere that as a founder, you should value your time at $500 an hour. If you break it down, it's not all that outlandish a theory — if it takes you 4 years at 50 hours a week to make a startup worth $10m, each of those hours were worth almost $1k. You should do everything in your power to make your time as productive as possible. This means sleeping at least 8 hours, eating healthy, and exercising. Get up and walk around at least once an hour. Your success is not measured by time spent, but by your output. Your output has diminishing returns with how much time you spend working. Invest in your developing environment. In terms of your output, there are two types of friction — mental (how fast you can move ideas from your head to the real world) and physical (how fast your computer reflects those ideas). There's a lot I do in my developing environment to cut out both types of friction, but I'll get more into that in a future blog post. On my 2015 MacBook Pro, saving a file and having the iPhone simulator recompile my changes took about 5 seconds. I was lucky enough to land some investment money from family and friends in January of 2018, and my first purchase was a 2017 MacBook Pro with pretty beefy specs. My shiny new MacBook Pro refreshes changes in less than 2.5 seconds. On average, I save and recompile 5 times a minute. Over the course of an 8 hour day, that's over an hour just waiting for my changes to be reflected. At $500/hour, the cost of my new MacBook was made up in less than a week. I am very privileged to be in a position where I can afford expensive toys like that, and I recognize not everyone else shares that privilege. However, the point still stands — your first priority should be to cut out all the friction involved in your output that you can. 4. Do things that make you extremely uncomfortable.I've said it before, and I'll say it many times — starting up is by far the hardest fucking thing I've ever done. In the 1.5 years I've been working on my app, I'd estimate I've grown to be a new version of myself four times. It did not happen easily — growth is more often painful than not. There are three major things I've done that serve as benchmarks for personal growth. 4.1: I raised money from family and friendsThe very nature of creativity is to be vulnerable — taking an idea and putting it out into the world is to open yourself to all forms of rejection. Pitching my app to raise money from family and friends was the first significantly uncomfortable thing I did. Most said no — this is where being able to remove your ego becomes so important. To take rejection personally and believe you were rejected because
is more than enough to make most people give up. Instead, view their rejection for what it actually is — humans are very irrational and resistant to change. 4.2.0: I started taking ice cold showersAll my life, I've despised cold water. It was a running joke in my family — I'd take my sweet time getting into a pool inch by inch, and wouldn't go into the ocean until August. When I first told my parents I'd been taking cold showers, they laughed hysterically because they thought I was kidding. After months of insults directed at my willpower, my co-founder Alden finally got me into taking ice cold showers. When I say ice cold showers, I mean the coldest possible setting. If it doesn't make you involuntarily gasp when you get in, and if you don't hate it the whole time, it's not cold enough. I've been taking cold showers since September 2018, and it hasn't gotten much easier — as winter set in and the coldest setting on the shower became colder and colder, the only way I'm willing to subject myself to them is by sitting in the sauna at the gym until my consciousness starts dissolving. At the same time, the benefits haven't gone away either (as someone who is very driven by the ratio of effort to reward, this is important) — if anything, the benefits have become more profound. After the first few seconds of severe discomfort, I literally feel unstoppable. You'll never feel more alive than the first few seconds of cold shock as your body freaks out and produces an adrenal response in an effort to maintain homeostasis. Why do PCP when you can achieve the same feeling with some cold water? There are countless health benefits of cold immersion therapy that people obsess over, but the benefit people usually fail to mention is what it does to your willpower. The energy required to eat healthy and focus throughout the day pales in comparison to the energy I expend in forcing myself to endure freezing cold water until I'm covered in goosebumps and shivering. I didn't start out that way — like I said earlier, discipline is a muscle. Unless you're Drake, it's hard to go from 0 to 100 real quick (or in this case, 100° to 40°): start by ending your showers cold, or toggling between hot and cold. The more you exercise your body's ability to maintain homeostasis, the more comfortable you will be in the cold, and in general. 4.3: I got rejected, oftenAfter we launched in April of 2017, I ordered a couple thousand stickers. My teammates and I would spend 30 seconds explaining the app while handing them out to people in dining halls/dorms on campus. People would say "I'm not really interested, sorry" straight to my face, or leave the stickers behind wherever they were sitting. I won't lie to you, that really fucking hurt. Saying "take your ego out of things, don't take things personally" is a lot easier than actually doing it. As much as it hurt to be told that whoever I'd just pitched to didn't care, it motivated me 10x more. I became immune to the fear of rejection — if the worst case scenario of putting yourself out there is getting rejected and ending up in the same place you started, fuck it, send it bröther. Odds are, you'll learn something. 5. Learn to say "Fuck It, Send".I am probably the biggest perfectionist I know. I used to make memes/write jokes on twitter (I'll link a collection of them in the comments). This was before the limit was 280 characters, which was a blessing as much as it was a curse— when I had a tweet idea, I'd sit on it for days or even weeks until I was certain it was written the best way it could be delivered. Here's the joke I'm most proud of, which currently stands at 48k likes and 4.5 million impressions (all organic): Her: when you said "magical in bed" this isn't exactly what I was exp- Me: *holds up 8 of hearts* is this your card Her: *softly* holy shit At 139 out of the former 140 character limit, I tweeted/deleted 5 different versions of it over two weeks before I was finally satisfied it was in the best format it could be. 5.1: MVPMinimum Viable Product is an art as much as it is a science — for example, my app didn't launch until users had the ability to peek other college's feeds. In hindsight, we shouldn't have built that functionality until people started actually downloading it at other schools. It's hard to have that kind of foresight — I was utterly convinced it was going to blow up immediately and I didn't want to launch before we were prepared for scale. The only way I found out otherwise was by putting it out into the world, something I would've done sooner if I didn't fall into the One More Feature trap. Having your app/servers crash because they're not properly equipped for scale is one of the best problems you can have. 5.2: One More FeatureIt's not hard to fall into the trap of thinking that this One More Feature is going to be the difference between success or not. It's much easier to sit behind a screen and develop more functionality than to put your ideas out into the world where they face rejection. This is where being honest with yourself is so important — is this one thing really what will make or break you? Or are you working on that feature because you're more comfortable developing than going out into the world and trying to get people to use your product? 5.3: Push NotificationsIn the early stages of launch, we sent very few push notifications. I was scared to annoy people — if I sent too many, they'd delete the app, and we'd never get anywhere. However, you have to understand that you don't owe the people who aren't using your product anything: the people that are one or two push notifications away from deleting your app are not the people that will be responsible for its success anyway. Obviously, don't overdo it, but it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Besides investing in yourself, learning to say "Fuck It, Send" is the best thing you can do for your product — the sooner you get it out into people's hands, the sooner you figure out why it sucks (which it inevitably will) and what you actually need to focus on to get it going. It also helps you prioritize the right things. Being the CEO, sole frontend developer, lead marketer, and literally every other role besides backend leaves me with much more on my plate every day than I can ever hope to get done. If I don't focus on what actually matters, I'll fail. This ultimatum is more a blessing than a curse, and the reason startups are even successful to begin with. These are just five of the innumerable lessons I've learned on this adventure, and I will be writing about more of them in the future. If you enjoyed this or learned something and want to keep up with my future blog posts, let me know and I'll drop you a link to my twitter/mailing list. [link] [comments]  |
| How do you start a social media account for a business? Posted: 21 Mar 2019 03:43 PM PDT I am in the middle of getting a start up going, and I have been getting really ancy about making an instagram page because I want to get an online presence started. I'm excited because I want to start sharing our goals, plans and future projects... to an extent of course. I've been scared to start because I don't want to dump a lot of content, and waste it without the content reaching anyone. I am currently in contact with a couple of other people that do similar projects, and I was going to ask for shoutouts as payment for some work I can provide for them so that I can get my name out. Does anyone have a 'process' that worked for them or are there any general guidelines to follow? Most advice I've seen just says to go for it, but my gut says doing it blindly isn't the best way about it. Any advice is appreciated! [link] [comments]  |
| Is an interactive UI enough to show what value can a product bring to users? Posted: 21 Mar 2019 08:23 PM PDT I'm trying to build a SaaS that helps sellers manage their stores on marketplaces. I was thinking about building the MVP and just had this thought this morning. I could just code up a usable "mini app" that demonstrate how our SaaS might bring value to them, place it on the home page so people can try it out and understand it without even signing up or anything. The "mini app" is just a bunch of buttons and texts (and maybe some textbox), all done without connecting it to a db or anything. The problem is I've never seen this kind of MVP before. All I've seen is "This is our product and it will be done in x months, sign up for more updates!!!" Should I try this MVP? [link] [comments]  |
| What does the future hold for tech-startups? Posted: 21 Mar 2019 09:09 AM PDT What does the future hold for tech-startups? Hey guys, I'm currently in university and have been making a few observations on start-ups. I'm currently new to all of this and would like to get your opinions, as most people here are more experienced than me. Theres this old adage that every tech start-up is basically a software company. I find that this is now shifting. While most start-ups focus on software, I find that software companies will need to incorporate ML/AI to stay ahead of the company. So essentially, the bar for innovation will increase for software companies, SaaS types, etc. If this is so, would this not mean that future tech entrepreneurs will need to know ML to compete in the future start-up ecosystem? Will knowing non-ML related be enough? It is widely accepted that the next wave of important technologies consists of AI, drones, AR/VR, cryptocurrencies, self-driving cars, and the "Internet of Things." These technologies are, collectively, hugely important and consequential — but they are not remotely as accessible to startup disruption as the web and smartphones were. So what will this mean for future entrepreneurs who want to create a successful start-up and create disruptive innovation? Will it be harder due to higher amount of funding needed? Will they have to specialize in more difficult skills (ML, deeplearning, etc)? I'm essentially worried about competing in the future. The bar for innovation, and ultimately for start-up success seems so much higher now? I feel like I need to gain skills that relate to deep tech, no? [link] [comments]  |
| Thank you for all the posts, but still struggling Posted: 21 Mar 2019 03:27 PM PDT I've been following the sub for years but I've never posted anything. I always love reading about startups successes and failures trying to learn myself what I could be doing better. For the last 18 months a friend and I built a product that never existed and today we finally went live. I'm not linking up here for fear you'll think I'm spamming you. Well we tried to do everything the "right" way. We thankfully have deep enough pockets so that we got all our groundwork setup, hired an ad agency, had a list of organic audience greater than 15,000 people before we finally launched our crowdfunding campaign. We had an insane start reaching 50% of our target goal in just a couple hours, and then suddenly it all stopped. I really don't know where to go from here. We've only been live for 7 hours as of this post, which I know is an extremly short amount of time. It's just so bizarre that we went from nothing to a huge start, received favorable notes from the editors at Indiegogo, placed on their favorites list and now we're frozen. Where would you go from here? [link] [comments]  |
| Clueless teen here but with an ambition to launch a startup here, where do I begin? Posted: 21 Mar 2019 02:44 PM PDT So i've read a couple of startup stories here and there and it really inspires me to come up with my own idea to launch a startup in the future, but it seems that there are many things which I do not understand about the startup business. I'm pretty much clueless on investing or things involving shares, demand, marketing etc. This ideas are all quite alien to me and I feel like majority of people on this subreddit understand the terminology and the fundementals of running a startup. So i'm meaning to ask you guys, how should I go about researching about the very basics of startups and what are some good resources? What are some tips you guys have for a clueless teen to prepare for the future of startups? [link] [comments]  |
| Is it worth to send cold snail mail investors? Posted: 21 Mar 2019 11:34 AM PDT The thought process is that I currently don't have enough connections to be able to get a warm introduction. I feel since the barrier to entry of sending an email is so low that most investors must get hundreds of emails per day of people trying to pitch their startup. Sending snail mail is obviously more inconvient since it cost money and takes a few days to send. But obviously because of this less people will be taking this option. From my own personal experience if I get a letter that doesn't blatantly look like some cheap flyer that some company mass mailed I am inclined to open it. For these reasons I am thinking of sending snail mail to potential investors we with a brief pitch and a print out of my pitch deck, is this a stupid idea? [link] [comments]  |
| Out of the testing phase, should everything be proprietary in Beta? Posted: 21 Mar 2019 10:42 AM PDT So I've come up with a more efficient model for recruiting but the process is mainly on the backend with the interview processing and assistance for smaller/mid-sized businesses . For simplicity it makes sense to mend this with an ATS and there are several very good free options for an ATS (mighty recruiter, smart recruiters) and I could always continue to piggyback their systems indefinitely but I think a branded full service solution would entangle customers, look better branded, and allow us full control. This step could also be necessary someday since I could gain on affiliates to job boards and other upsells which is the business model that these free ATS services use. The downside is that these pre-built systems are light years ahead of what I could spin up in regards to integrations, features, and functionality. [link] [comments]  |
| Why does the internet in general seem to be against people trying to “self promote” their ideas? Posted: 21 Mar 2019 10:22 AM PDT I can get why sites like Reddit; Medium, Quora, etc are resistant because it pulls people away from their sites. But why are regularly people against folks talking about their own projects? Is it because these sites have caused a - drink the coolaid situation, or because people have become spam gun shy. I enjoy reading about new ideas and try to avoid limiting my internet exposure to only the largest sites. With all the hatred on larger organizations like Facebook, it seems like the discovery of smaller sites would be wanted and necessary. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 21 Mar 2019 10:17 AM PDT Everyone dismisses the "idea guy" and says that he or she is useless and that any person can come up with an idea.. and that its all about the people who "bring something to the table" whether it's skills and/or money.. but I beg to differ. I think the idea guy is important-- because they are usually the ones who bring the table itself and chairs and the room-- because without them, the skills guy and the money guy would not have anywhere to take their experti$e-- and the conversation of bringing something to the table would not have been had... if they didn't include them in the first place. Well I mean, they could always work for themselves or for big companies but how often does anyone get an offer for a bigger piece of the pie? not often. Yes, I understand they can be full of themselves and over value themselves... and I think they should take a smaller share than they usually want but I don't think they should be dismissed. I think we need millions of idea guys so that billions can profit or benefit from their ideas-- there should be a platform of sorts for collaborative idea sharing and building... so that they can churn 'em out by the dozens and there would be people with the expertise and money who are waiting to make it happen. What do you guys think? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 21 Mar 2019 06:11 AM PDT Looking to start an app having window installers come out to install windows.
Thank you for any help you can provide with this! I am looking to launch this within the next one to two weeks and would aim to see results soon! Very optimistic [link] [comments]  |
| I lost my job. Snap me back to reality Posted: 21 Mar 2019 05:18 AM PDT Hi, I lost my job. I am not in my own country. I am in a foreign country to be with my girlfriend. I am skilled in software. I really do not want to get a full time roll. I have been freelancing for the last year and a half. Currently I have no clients. I am not very good at finding clients. The thought of being trapped in a software full time roll is awful. I do not mind working part time in my feild. I would prefer do something else other than program. I am skilled in sales. I am competent and skilled. I just don't want to work for someone full time. I do not want to commit to working for someone full time. I would be miserable working full time in software for a year. I could do it for a few months. Or if I was hired by a startup I might be happy. I would like to work on my startup. Could you give me some advice. Snap me back to reality? Any ideas? A part time remote sales software job would be perfect. [link] [comments]  |
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